Right angle multi-contact printed circuit board connectors having contacts connected to conductive areas on a printed circuit board arranged in a matrix with a predetermined grid spacing are known in the art and are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,834,662 issued to one of the applicants of the subject application, the disclosure of which patent is incorporated herein by reference. Because of the geometry of the right angle connector, contact portions or legs are required to extend from the back of the connector housing to establish electrical connections to the conductive areas on the printed circuit board. Present arrangements have contact legs extending from the lowermost row of the connector contacted the conductive areas on the printed circuit board located closest to the connector housing and contact legs of the uppermost rows overlapping the lower legs and connecting to conductive areas located farthest away from the connector housing. The result is that the actual lengths of the individual contact legs located in different rows are not the same.
While this type of a connecting arrangement has been satisfactory for most of the prior art electrical circuit applications, the varying length of the contact legs results in different signal delay times for signals passing through the connector. With ever shorter switching times of active electronic elements and circuits, this becomes a problem and consequently, either phase shifting of signal trains have to be accepted or other measures to compensate for signal delayed times must be considered.